UCSF Profiles coauthorship networks, by degree

/ Anirvan Chatterjee

We’re using UCSF Profiles data to explore whether co-authorship networks are a good way to show the connections between researchers at UCSF.

We can start off by looking at immediate co-authorship connections. I was surprised at how few current UCSF co-authors most users have. The flip side of co-authoring widely outside of one’s institution is that there are fewer internal co-authors:

Avg # contacts, 1 degree away

The numbers jump when you go one degree further out, though the relative proportions are similar:

1 and 2 degree

The numbers grow further when we count first, second, and third degree coauthors.

1-3 degree contacts

My big takeaways are unsurprising:

  • The number of UCSF co-authorships generally grow with seniority — which may correlate with both the length of one’s career, as well as one’s tenure at UCSF
  • Even in the case of professors’ 1st-3rd degree, connections, we’re maxing out at 180 people, out of about 6,500 people in UCSF Profiles. This number may correlate to the size of one’s department/field at UCSF.
  • If we showed logged-in UCSF Profiles users a visualization showing “here’s how you know this person” when looking at another random user’s profile, it would kick in pretty infrequently — thought that might be different for folks in the same field/department

One thought on “UCSF Profiles coauthorship networks, by degree”

  1. “number may correlate to the size of one’s department/field” – well, I am not sure if that number not also depends largely on what type of research is done. I assume, when data collection is a large part of the overall workload (including taking surveys, making field observations etc.) the bias would be more “staff” and “postdoc” or “student” (why are the latter not mentioned separately?) and if it were a more theoretical work (cf. Einstein) you would have either single authors or smaller teams with higher level of seniority.

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